It is often desirable in business today to transfer information from one location to another, whether the information be a document, sound, pictures, or video. Today most forms of information can be digitized. Digitized information is a representation of the original information in the form of binary data--a sequence of 1's and 0's. Information must be generally be in digitized format to be useable by computers or just about any form of electronics equipment.
However, telephones by themselves can only transfer information in analog (non-digital) form. To transfer digital information over telephone lines, the information must be converted to analog form, transmitted, and converted back to digital form. Converting information back and forth between analog and digital form causes distortion which is compounded when converted multiple times. Additionally, saving the analog information that comes over the telephone and digitizing it is a cumbersome task.
Facsimile machines can simplify the transfer of documents. They can not, however, transfer sound or video. Additionally, it is usually desirable for several reasons, including the ability to edit the document, to receive a document in a specific digital form readable by a word processor, generally a format known as ASCII. Facsimile machines are not capable of doing this without the aid of optical character recognition (OCR) software. OCR software is notoriously unreliable in converting facsimiles into ASCII or similar formats, thus necessitating time spent in "cleaning up" the converted document. Even then, formatting codes used by word processors are lost in the process.
Modems are capable of transferring digital information directly from one computer to another over analog telephone lines. However, modems must either be answered manually when a call from another modem arrives, which is inconvenient, or they must be left on auto-answer which leaves the computer and any network attached thereto vulnerable to attacks by hackers. Furthermore, to transfer information by modem, a time must be found when both the sender's modem and recipient's modem are idle.
The Internet, which is a global network of computers, has facilitated the transfer of digital information which overcomes many of the limitations mentioned above. On the other hand, a dedicated connection to the Internet leaves a computer vulnerable to attacks by hackers. The information transferred passes through several computers on several smaller subnetworks en route, thereby leaving it vulnerable to eavesdropping by others. Additionally, electronic mail ("e-mail") sent over the Internet, can often sit on a computer of a third party for significant periods of time (depending on how often a user retrieves his or her e-mail) during which it is vulnerable to eavesdropping or modification.
Companies can setup private networks using high bandwidth leased lines. The shortcomings of this method include both the high cost of leasing the lines, and the inability to securely transfer data to anyone who is not on the private network.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,440,618 to Riegel et al. teaches the use of computers preprogrammed with a telephone number of a remote monitoring computer. When the remote monitoring computer needs data from the preprogrammed computers, it places a call to the preprogrammed computer over a secure network. In response thereto, the preprogrammed computer calls the monitoring computer over the public telephone network at the telephone number with which it has been preprogrammed. This method does not provide for transferring data to anyone, but a single user at a predetermined location. It also does not allow data to be transferred bidirectionally.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a means of securely transferring binary data from one computer to any number of other computers over the public telephone network.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system of transferring binary data over a public telephone network with a means of controlling the traffic flow.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to provide such a system, which is impervious to hacking, eavesdropping, and identity spoofing.
Other objects of the invention will become apparent from the specification described herein below.